It's clear that the CCK, gmaps, location and views combo can be used to create some pretty sweet maps displaying the location of individual nodes (see Zack Rosen's San Francisco crime map, and other great examples).
However, how can this combo be used where:
a) Location information is not precise eg. we have town, but not lat/lon/zip
b) You only want to display summary information eg. "all burglaries in San Francsico" or "all news from Berlin"
c) The country you are working with has no civic overlay (province, streets, postcode)
I can think of this way of doing it (using the SF crime maps as context):
a) use CCK to create a simple, location-enabled content type: "Summary"
b) create a Summary node, give it a location slap bang in the middle of San Francisco
c) Create a taxonomy term for "burglaries" - and fill the node you just created with a php snippet displaying title and date of all nodes tagged with "burglaries"
d) Whip up a quick, page-displaying, gmap-view displaying the body of content-type "Summary" ... et voila!
e) Do some themeing to tidy up the display
Now, I am begging somebody way smarter to tell me there is a far more elegant way to do this.
-- Case.
